by Peter Straub
The room was very hot: everything in it exuded a faint burning smell, as if it were smoldering somewhere deep within. Where are we, I wondered, what is this terrible place?
Then I saw a familiar typing table down at the far end of the room, set before a familiar window. They seemed an acre away. The window was black. I jerked my head sideways toward Richard, almost expecting him to deny what I already knew, and behind his worried face I saw the Glenda poster leaning against the bookshelves. We were in my living room. It had been stretched out about three times its length, but the Bad Place was my living room.
“Hey, Graham,” Richard said, “don’t—”
“Don’t what?” another voice screeched from far down at the other end of the room. Oh, I thought I knew that voice too. I turned to see that a squat man in a double-breasted suit, his meaty face bristling with five-o’clock shadow so dark it was like a tattoo of a beard, was standing up behind my desk. Him. “Don’t you want your pinko friend to understand what’s happening to him? Williams!” The Senator poked a thick forefinger at me. “You’re a lousy Commie, do your friends know that?”
“I was never even a halfway decent Communist, much less a lousy one,” I said.
“You were weak!” he bellowed at me. “You’re a drunk! A lousy alkie! Lush! Boozehound! You abandoned two wives—are your friends aware of your despicable record, of your cheating and lying, are they aware of how you weaseled yourself into marriage twice and then betrayed your wives? I have here, Mr. Williams, I have a list in my hand which contains not only all of your extensive Communist affiliations from 1938 to 1952, but also your sex partners during that period.” He was brandishing something that looked like a grocery receipt. “This is a disgusting record, Williams, this is evidence of moral degradation. You’re disgusting because you’re weak. Weak! You’re a weak, treacherous Commie drunk.”
“A drunk I was,” I said. “I cheated on my wives too, just about as much as they cheated on me. But I never abandoned anyone.” I was starting to get the shakes.
That shifty tattooed-looking face suddenly was only a foot or two from my own. “Weak and treacherous.” I could smell the booze on his breath, also onions. “Tell me this, Williams. Don’t you know that Tabby Smithfield would still be alive if you hadn’t infected him with your sick fantasies?”
I started to throw a punch at his gloating face, but the face had changed before my fist had even picked up any momentum. He had turned into a capering red devil. Now he was at least two feet taller than I and he bent over me, grinning, and a forked tongue slid out of his mouth. Searing heat came off him. I felt Richard pulling me backward, and I forgot about hitting anybody and concentrated on backpedaling. If I hadn’t started moving my feet, Richard would have yanked me right back on my keester.
That burning devil reached out for me: his hand came so close to my face that I saw how it was composed of a million interlacing flames, little jets of fire so tightly bound together that they formed a solid body, solid flesh. He would have taken off my face if he had closed that hand on me. Richard was moving me backward with the reckless power of a flood or a tornado, and I stayed on my feet, and the red hand just flicked past me.
Past most of me, anyhow. His hand grazed mine—the one with which I had intended to hit him. A hundred daggers pierced my skin, acid splashed over the wounds, I yelled incoherently; and everything went absolutely black, but not before I had heard a deep chuckle.
* * *
We were back in the tunnel and the smell was worse. Another dim light lay far ahead of us, sending feeble illumination through the fleshy tube of the tunnel. “You okay, Graham?” Richard asked.
I couldn’t meet his eyes; that would have told him the truth. “Yeah, sure,” I said. I was shaken up, as much by what that imitation polecat had said as by what had happened right after. Well, that’s almost true; it’s what should be true. Yet I knew I had just come much closer to death than I had on Kendall Point. I could still see that huge grinning red face floating up above mine, and I knew how scared I’d been—too scared to move, if Richard had not intervened. The hand that creature had lightly touched still felt as though a tank had run over it.
“Are you?” Patsy asked.
“I never abandoned anyone,” I said. “Jesus, I never did that. Someday I’ll tell you the story of my marriages.” But even as I said this I was seeing the grotesque red face hovering so close to mine, and feeling again that primitive terror. A devil! Devils did not exist, except as metaphors.
Then I remembered things I had said in London. That devil is contaminating wells all over America.
Oh, yes: I saw. I felt as though I could almost sort of move again.
“What the hell do you suppose is up ahead there?” I asked them.
“I wish I didn’t have to find out,” Richard said. We started forward again. I painfully revolved my right hand in the murk of the tunnel, and saw that it was completely unmarked.
* * *
This time we did not come around a loop in the tunnel to be blinded by a sudden barrage of light; that was what we expected. Instead the tunnel gradually became wider still and the light more pervasive. We seemed to be going down a slight incline. This too gradually became more pronounced, and as the light ahead grew brighter by degrees, the floor of the tunnel began to dip so markedly that the three of us had to move more slowly, using our knees to check the pull of gravity. When the tunnel began to level off again the walls and ceiling pulled away. Just when I was thinking that our tunnel was getting to look like a vaulted chamber we saw the first dead people.
They were fat and naked, standing at the side of the by now enormous tunnel; an old man and an old woman, motionless as department-store mannequins. Their eyes were closed, their skin chalk-white. They were just bulky old bags of flesh. Then I saw that they were my old friends from the beach, Harry and Babe Zimmer. I looked down in a hurry. As we went past, I felt as much as saw them turning toward us with an awful slowness.
“Oh, no,” I said, seeing what was ahead. The tunnel walls swung out another step, creating a huge space that seemed hundreds of feet wide and as high as a cathedral. Dr. Norm Hughardt, as white and dead as the Zimmers, was turning to face us at the entrance to this enormous chamber. His little Lenin beard had overgrown its boundaries and now looked woolly and derelict. Like the Zimmers, he moved as if through a vat of glue. A thick white worm was working its way across Norm’s substantial potbelly. Norm raised one of his hands in a gesture of almost witless entreaty.
Behind him hundreds of others trudged with that painful slowness through the vast chamber.
We walked past Norm Hughardt into this hopeless way station for the dead. My nerves were shot—I didn’t want to see anybody, I didn’t want to look at their faces, I just wanted to get through this horrible place. I felt pushing toward us the numb misery of all those dead, that stricken imploring wretchedness they could not help sending out.
At least we did not seem to be in any real danger—the dead moved so slowly and questioningly that even I could outmaneuver them. I thought this was an exercise in disheartening us, in softening us up. The hundreds of dead were beseeching us to rescue them: to bring them back with us to the surface of the earth: and we could not help but feel the drag and pull of that plea. Gideon Winter would weaken us with pity—weaken Patsy and Richard with it, anyhow, for already he had pretty well cut my strings—and then come in for the kill. Certainly we had to pity these poor creatures. I saw the people reaching out in such numbers that their arms interlaced.
And then I thought I saw the proof of this theory. In the center of the vast chamber lay a bubbling pool of gray lathery liquid; it belched out acrid fumes. Richard began to lead us around the edges of this sulfurous pond, at the same time trying to make sure that none of those reaching out toward us could actually get near enough to touch us. I was just trying to keep my feet moving. Part of me was tired enough to lie down and give up. Then Patsy went electrically taut at my side; and a few fee
t ahead, Richard Allbee stopped walking.
“No, no, no,” Richard said. “That’s not true”: as if he were rebutting an argument.
I looked reluctantly toward the bubbling pool. A body labored at its far edge, struggling with that slow patient hopelessness to get itself out onto the floor. The body was slight, young, boyish. Beneath the streaks of gray scum from the pool, it was chalky white, like the others. After the boy’s body had managed to get itself out of the pool, another head broke the surface. A man’s corpse began trying to lift itself onto the ground, and as soon as it was halfway out of the pool I recognized it. I had just seen Les McCloud in the doorway of Bates Krell’s kitchen, so the identification of his body was an easy task. Then I had to look back at the body of the boy and face what I had seen in the first microseconds of its appearance—seen with my heart as well as my eyes. The dead boy was Tabby Smithfield. The big worms had found him already and were sliding across his legs.
He could take us one by one, I couldn’t see how we would have the heart to fight him, we might as well lie down in the chamber of the dead and get used to being there.
A little knot of flies had fastened on Tabby’s neck.
At last I accepted the possibility—no, the likelihood—that Tabby was dead. That pitiful slight body on the far side of the pool rolled on its side with a horrible slowness.
I groaned, and the dim light filling the enormous chamber shifted to red. On the bodies still painfully limping toward us the white worms began to swell and bloat, now as red as the light. All around us the dead began to wail.
Two of them thrust their way through to the front of the pleading mob before us. I saw stringy red hair, and then recognized the face of the woman reporter who had stood over Johnny Sayre’s body with me. Sarah Spry. She had managed to force one of her eyes open, giving her face a squinting and piratical appearance. “Go, give up,” she said. Her voice was a rusty whisper. “You’re gone now, you have to give up. Graham, you’re dead.”
The man woozily standing beside Sarah Spry popped open both of his eyes and screeched, “Dead! Dead!”
Something fat and white fell on Patsy from above, knocking her down flat to the floor. Richard and I were so startled by this sudden assault that we were frozen in our postures for what seemed like whole minutes.
I was just working out that what had fallen on Patsy was the body of a man, not one of the bloated worms, when she started to scream. Patsy was trying to get to her feet, and the dead man lying over her raised his fists and clubbed her back down. His body had been gnawed and chewed about the middle, and his buttocks were only shreds of white tissue. Patsy screamed again. I tried to pull him off by yanking back on his shoulders, but it was like trying to move a concrete statue. He turned his head and grinned, and I recognized him as Archie Monaghan, a lawyer who had been hot stuff on the golf course. He was trying to kill Patsy, and I could not stop him. I grabbed his ears and tried again to force him off. I started to hit him in the side of the head. Patsy bucked frantically on the floor.
“Move it, Graham,” Richard shouted. “How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Huh?” I finally saw that Richard was pointing the shotgun at the same point on Archie Monaghan’s head that I had been trying to turn into pulp.
“Get away!” he screamed, and I threw myself backward.
Richard put the Purdy right up to Archie’s temple and pulled both triggers.
Archie’s head blew apart. Gray tissues and flecks of white bone sprayed out over the bubbling surface of the pool. The rest of Archie Monaghan remained upright for less time than it took for the echoing blast to die away. Then it dropped sideways off Patsy like a dead crab. The shotgun in Richard’s hand flickered feebly.
Both of us reached forward to help Patsy and she took our two outstretched hands. Around us the light was dimming, becoming only a red darkness.
Patsy came up on her feet and put her arms around both of us for a second.
“We have to run,” Richard said.
In minutes we were back in a narrower space, then the walls closed in even closer about us, and Patsy and Richard walked on ahead of me. Patsy’s step was quick and firm, but I could see her hands trembling. The smells of the tunnel were even worse now, and here and there a small fire flared out, feeding on the gases. This was the world’s bowel we had entered from the door in Krell’s basement—the mirror’s bowel, too. I knew it would bring us to Gideon Winter eventually; and all three of us must have known that Richard’s turn was next.
6
Kendall Point
1
Richard Allbee’s sense of direction, always dependable, had surprised its owner by functioning underground. When they had left Bates Krell’s basement they had gone through the north wall and started angling east, and northeast was still the direction in which they were going. They were being led, he thought, to Kendall Point: Gideon Winter’s burial ground seemed the inevitable place for their final confrontation. Richard did not want to show it in any way, but he was worried about his friends’ readiness for this encounter.
Both Graham Williams and Patsy McCloud seemed half-stunned by what had happened to them—a large part of their stupor would have been caused by the sight of Tabby, so obviously dead, emerging from that stinking pool. Neither Graham nor Patsy would have survived the tunnel without action Richard had taken: after that pallid corpse had fallen on Patsy, Graham had seemed too stunned to do anything but strike it on the head. Obviously Winter was reserving some special torture for him, Richard thought, some sideshow worse than the Grand Central of the Dead they had just escaped; and he wondered if Patsy in particular were capable of acting quickly and rationally. Walking along beside him, keeping pace, she looked to Richard as if she needed most of her energy just to keep herself from fainting.
Whatever was going to happen, Richard thought, he would have to save himself. At the same time, he’d have to protect Patsy and Graham, to see that they also were not caught.
Ahead of them a dim light had appeared, and Richard felt all his muscles involuntarily tense themselves. His test, whatever it would be, was up there, and Richard was torn between bolting back the way they had come and breaking into a run—just to get it over with as quickly as he could. He kept walking, and the light playfully receded.
His testicles seemed to have frozen down to the size of a baby’s. Patsy slipped her hand over his arm.
With every step he took, the light backed away, never altering its intensity, which was no stronger than that of a child’s night-light. Richard gripped Patsy’s arm close to his body with his own; his heart felt as though it were tripping on itself.
He took another step, and the dim light backed away from him again. He wondered what would happen if he shot at it. He and Patsy took another step together, and the fuzzy light once again retreated.
Then all at once the light was no closer, but it was familiar. He knew it. He had seen it somewhere, but without taking any notice of it: it was just a domestic workhorse, a bit of stage-setting.
Exactly.
He knew what it was, and as he and Patsy moved forward again the light did not retreat. They took another step forward, and Graham followed them into the unobtrusively altered space. Stage-setting, Richard thought. What else? The walls of the tunnel had widened, become more detailed. Shadowy objects loomed all about them. A few feet from the dim light, which in fact was a child’s night-light, a triangular pennant cheered ARHOOLIE.
He saw his tall skis propped against the wall next to the closet.
Light came seeping into the bedroom, bringing its boyish clutter up into unchallengeable reality. If he kicked that chair, he would bruise his foot. If he threw the skis at the window, they would clatter down onto an actual front lawn. Richard heard noises from downstairs, the propmen and stagehands and cameramen moving about, all those who had been his true family during those years. From somewhere closer came the idle summery buzzing of a couple of flies.
A moment
or two before the others, Richard saw the bodies on Spunky Jameson’s bed. The flies he had heard were wandering up and down on them, lifting off and landing again. Tabby and Laura were only just recognizable. Naked, sprawled on their sides like lovers turned to each other, his wife and the boy were crosshatched with cuts and wounds, strip-mined, trampled, pulped. Could Graham and Patsy take it, seeing Tabby this bad? Richard turned from the bed, thinking almost that he should put a hand over each of their pairs of eyes—but they had seen it, and were wondering the same about him.
“Oh, Richard,” Patsy said: he saw that she was more concerned for him than for herself.
Then a gray cat came padding toward them across the carpet, and Richard felt all his muscles tense themselves again. The cat came to within two or three feet of Richard and Patsy and sat on its haunches, looking at them with wide unblinking eyes. A second later Billy Bentley strolled in from the same nowhere.
2
Richard stepped away from Patsy and challenged Billy’s pitted, mocking face. “You’re Gideon Winter,” he said.
Billy’s shadowy face admitted another sharp slice of amusement. “Not yet I’m not. You’ll see, bro.”
“We want Tabby Smithfield,” Richard said. “I don’t care who or what you are, but I do want you to get Tabby out of whatever foul hole he’s in and bring him to us.”
Billy lifted his eyebrows.
“Alive or dead,” Richard said. “Just give him back to us.”
“The way I gave your sexy wife back to you?” Billy asked. “I guess you liked that.” His cat opened its mouth and laughed with a woman’s voice.
Something struck the floor in front of Billy, the cat bunched itself up and shot away, and a model airplane rolled over once more before coming to rest. Graham thrust himself up beside Richard, his eyes snapping. In Richard’s hand, the old Purdy shotgun flickered once.